And I took the comfort of that. I clung to it, holding it against my chest so it would give me strength for the days ahead.
Margaret insisted I sit in the back of the black Mercedes sedan.
“So you can stretch out,” she said. “We got a drive ahead of us.”
I couldn’t remember from the frantic middle-of-the-night drive up to this mountain how long it took, but I settled into the plush backseat, exhausted yet wide awake.
The first of the leaves were turning up here, and in the dense green of the forest, there would be one bright blaze of color. Red or orange. The sign that change was coming.
We drove down a gravel road and I saw the other buildings. A charming house set back in the forest that must have been Margaret’s. And a little farther, what looked like an airplane hangar. There were trucks parked in front.
That must be his garage, I thought, turning as we drove by until I was looking out the back window.
He was there, standing in the shadows, and as we drove by he stepped out into the road, watching us as we made our way off his mountain. He wore a black fleece with his jeans, and the late afternoon sunlight slashed across his face.
I pressed my hand against the glass as if I could touch him. Desperately I wanted to believe this wasn’t goodbye.
But I wasn’t lying to myself anymore.
The Flowered Manor was entirely the same, but somehow completely different. What had appealed to me before when I’d been scared and looking for a place to hide now seemed utterly astonishing. Repellant in a way.
It was so small. A tiny island of RVs and double-wide trailers in a wide sea of forest and kudzu. The rain and the darkening sky made everything seem sad. Fragile somehow. As if the metal and plastic walls people lived behind were a laughable attempt to keep everyone safe.
A solid wind would blow all of this away.
“I’m leaving you here?” Margaret asked, clearly horrified.
I smiled, weary. I nearly said it was my home, but my home was a thousand miles away from here. A two-story white farmhouse surrounded by soy and cornfields and wide, white-blue sky as far as the eye could see.
I had not missed it and I couldn’t say that I missed it now, but I felt very keenly that it was mine.
“You can stop here,” I said, just as we drove up to the office. Looking at it now I realized it was a modified garden shed, not unlike the one where all the tools I’d been using were kept.
“Are you sure, honey?” she asked.
“I’m sure. And thank you…for the food and the ride.” For taking such good care of Dylan.
“My pleasure and,” she sighed, “I love that boy to death. Like he was my own. But he’s not easy. And he carries a burden so heavy he’s getting crushed under it and doesn’t even realize.”
I knew that; perhaps that was part of what we’d been attracted to at the beginning. Both of us knowing, somehow, that we were carrying impossible loads.
“And sometimes,” Margaret continued, “I wish he would meet a girl. Someone like you. Someone who doesn’t care about his money and his scars. Or what he’s done in the past. Who cares about him. Who makes him smile and pulls him out of that garage where he’d spend every living moment of his life, and then I think…no. If he met a girl who loved him, she would get crushed under that burden too.” She turned to face me. “Don’t come back, Annie.”
I blinked, stunned.
“It hurts me to say, but you’re a good girl. Find yourself an easier man and don’t come back.”
I stumbled out of the car, my goodie bag of gourmet leftovers banging against my legs. She lifted a hand in a wave and the car pulled away, flinging mud up everywhere. My eyes burned. My throat hurt and my body was sore from Dylan’s hands.
Instead of going to my trailer, where I would do nothing but lie there and think of Dylan, I walked toward the office. Toward distraction.
The bell rang over the door as I stepped into the office. Kevin was playing solitaire in front of the blasting air conditioner.
Exactly the same. Like I’d never left.
I appreciated Dylan’s offer of the house, but if I was going to divorce Hoyt, I had to stand on my own two feet. And